XMPP-SMS bridge for Voxbone's voxsms

Voxbone provides an SMS API for their DIDs, so if you VoIP with Voxbone, you're able to text too. They don't provide an app, however.

If you have access to a cloud server, you can set up a Prosody XMPP server. After setting up the server, you can use any XMPP client (e.g. Conversations for Android) to send and receive SMS messages on the go.

Initial setup at Voxbone

Create two new SMS link groups at https://www.voxbone.com/portal/configuration/sms-link. I call mine "outbound_group" and "me_inbound". Now create two sms links, one for inbound texts and one for outbound. Assume your did is +1-416-555-1234.

Direction: To Voxbone
Protocol: REST JSON
Link Group: outbound_group
Name: Outbound SMS Link
Login: mylogin
Password: My.Password.123:)
Load Balancing Weight: 1

And the inbound (I have one inbound group for each DID, but you could set it up differently):

Direction: From Voxbone
Protocol: REST JSON
Link Group: me_inbound
Name: NodeJS Me (inbound)
Login:
Password:
URL: http://xmpp.example.com:8080/receive
Load Balancing Weight: 1

Note that the login and password are left blank, and that I'm assuming you have the domain xmpp.example.com and you're going to use port 8080. Voxbone limits the allowed ports to 443, 4443, 80, 8080, or 8443.

Initial setup on your server

Again, I've assumed your domain will be xmpp.example.com and the port will be 8080. Install prosody and nodejs on your server. On Debian, I recommend using node source for an up to date node version, so the commands would be:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_7.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install nodejs prosody

Find a tutorial to configure prosody and set it up to serve on xmpp.example.com or your equivalent. You'll probably end up with a file called /etc/prosody/conf.d/xmpp.example.com/cfg.lua. This will have VirtualHost blocks and Component blocks. Add two lines to this file:

Component "sms.example.com"
    component_secret = "SMSBotPasswordIsVerySecret"

Note that xmpp.example.com needs to be a real domain that resolves, but sms.example.com is entirely internal to your prosody server and doesn't need to resolve.

Now add a user. Let's assume your user will be called "me".

prosodyctl adduser [email protected]

Configure the server

Now clone this repository and enter the directory. Set up dependencies like so:

npm install
cp secrets.js.example secrets.js

Edit secrets.js to look something like this (of course all of your values will look different):

	const secrets = {
		apiLogin: 'mylogin',
		apiPassword: 'My.Password.123:)',

		xmppDomain: 'xmpp.example.com',
		xmppPort: '5280',
		xmppMappings: {
			'14165551234': 'me',
		}, 
		reverseXmppMappings: {
			'me':   '14165551234',
		},

		smsBotDomain: 'sms.example.com',
		smsBotPassword: 'SMSBotPasswordIsVerySecret'
	}

	module.exports = secrets

I have the code at /root/voxsms-xmpp-bridge. I use this systemd file at /etc/systemd/system/voxsms-xmpp-bridge.service to make sure the server stays up. Note that if you are on debian, your node may have a different path (e.g. `/usr/bin/nodejs):

	[Unit]
	Description=launch voxsms-xmpp-bridge node server on boot
	After=network-online.target

	[Service]
	ExecStart=/bin/bash -c '/usr/bin/node /root/voxsms-xmpp-bridge/server.js >> /var/log/voxsms-xmpp-bridge.log'
	WorkingDirectory=/root/voxsms-xmpp-bridge
	Restart=always
	RestartSec=1

	[Install]
	WantedBy=multi-user.target

This service is configured to log to /var/log/voxsms-xmpp-bridge.log - you might want to set up logrotate.d to rotate this file. To enable the service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable voxsms-xmpp-bridge
systemctl start voxsms-xmpp-bridge
systemctl status voxsms-xmpp-bridge

Send and receive SMS

Now log in to your XMPP client and connect to the server using the username "me" and the password you set up. Create a new contact, e.g. [email protected] to text that DID, and send a message. XMPP will pass the message to this server, which will POST to voxbone's API. Inbound messages will be sent to http://xmpp.example.com/receive/:did:, will be read by the server, and will be sent over XMPP to your client.